"Live from Baltimore -- It's the Johns
Hopkins Science Review!"

By Sue De Pasquale

Back in 1948 when TV was still in
its infancy, Johns Hopkins hit the airwaves with a long-running
weekly program that featured workd renowned scientists and
scientific "firsts." During its heyday, more than one million
viewers tuned in from across the nation.

On Tuesday night, December 5,1950, families across America
settled down before the blue glow of their television sets
for an evening of entertainment. While many flipped to the
NBC network to watch the wildly popular Milton Berle, there
were others--a sizeable number, in fact--who tuned in to the
DuMont network. They were lured by the promise that they
would witness medical history in the making on that night's
live airing of The Johns Hopkins Science Review.

"If I seem a bit eager to get on with the program, it's
because I'm excited," began the show's announcer Lynn Poole,
from his customary opening spot behind a wooden desk.
"Tonight, we bring you the first public showing of an
amazing new machine, developed by Dr. Russell Morgan, chief
of radiology here at Johns Hopkins."

Over the course of the next 30 minutes, the white-
coated Dr. Morgan showed how he had developed the world's
first X-ray fluoroscope, equipped to provide clear, moving
images of the body's dynamic processes--the pulsating heart,
the lungs as they inflate and deflate. Once Morgan had
demonstrated the fluoroscope, the camera cut back to Poole.
"We are about to witness a momentous event," said the
announcer. "The first inter-city diagnosis and consultation
ever seen on TV."

The camera panned back to the massive fluoroscope,
under which lay a burly machinist. A few weeks earlier, an
industrial accident had left him with several shards of
metal in his back. Recently he'd begun coughing up small
amounts of blood and experiencing excruciating pain. Were
the metal pieces in danger of piercing his lungs?

Two doctors, one in Chicago, the other in New York,
would help Dr. Morgan in Baltimore with the diagnosis. They
sat in front of their respective TV sets, connected by phone
to the Baltimore studio.

"Dr. Hodges, do you hear me? Are you receiving the
picture?" asked Poole.

The doctor's reply was prompt. "Yes, I hear you and I
am receiving the picture clearly."

Then Poole asked, "In New York, Dr. Sennot, do you hear
me?"

"This is Dr. Sennot in New York, and I am receiving the
picture clearly."

At Sennot's request, the patient took a deep breath.
The metal particles, visible on the fluoroscope as small
black shadows, did not move. Then Hodges asked Gould to
palpate the patient's back. This time the shadows did move.
After several more moments of consultation, the three
arrived at a diagnosis.

"Mr. Carter, we have good news for you," Morgan leaned
down to tell the prone patient. "We can remove the foreign
bodies surgically with relatively little difficulty. From a
vocational standpoint, you'll be in fine shape after a
relatively minor operation."

For the viewing audience at home, this was heady stuff.
"The X-ray program of last night left us with a feeling that
a miracle was performed in our living rooms," wrote one
viewer from Boonton, New Jersey. "Programs such as these are
a priceless possession in the lives of average people."
Indeed, throughout this postwar period when television was
still in its infancy, Americans were captivated by the new
medium. And they were hungry to learn about the latest
advances in science--advances, they believed with the
optimism of that era, that would ultimately improve their
own lives. The Johns Hopkins Science Review fueled that
collective appetite by offering up a regular menu of world-
renowned scientists and scientific "firsts."

The long list of those who appeared on Hopkins
television during its 12-year run from 1948 to 1960 reads
like a "Who's Who" of scientific luminaries: "Big Bang"
theorist George Gamow; Wernher von Braun, the pioneering
rocket engineer; Harold Urey, co-developer of the atom bomb;
James Van Allen, who first confirmed the existence of
radiation belts around the Earth. Frequently, the show's
producers called on Hopkins faculty to appear: William
Foxwell Albright, for instance, on "Archaeology of the Holy
Land," and Abel Wolman, with the cautionary "Don't Drink
That Water." Actor John Astin '52, later of Addams Family
fame, made his TV debut while a Hopkins undergraduate. The
young Astin enthusiastically played the role of a carnival
barker in a Science Review program about glass-blowing for
scientific apparatus.

At a time when the word "pregnant" was banned on
network TV, the Science Review was the first to show a live
birth on television. Decades before breast cancer became a
subject of national scrutiny, the Review, in 1953, ran a
show in which female viewers were taught how to examine
their breasts for cancer, then shown a woman's chest with
mastectomy scar. That show ended with the patient, a well-
known pianist, playing the piano to show that the mastectomy
had not damaged her playing ability. In 1952, when most
Americans consigned the idea of space travel to sci-fi
fantasy, the series featured a three-part series entitled
"Man Will Conquer Space." Experts from Hopkins, UCLA,
Princeton, and the U.S. Army explained the principles of
rocket design and propulsion, showing how interplanetary
travel and space stations would one day allow travel to the
moon.

"If you can tear yourself away from Uncle Miltie for a
minute or two, you'll be greatly surprised at the enormous
variety of things they're poking into down at Johns
Hopkins," wrote a reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune
in 1950. The Science Review became the first American
program to be seen in Europe in 1951, when the United
Nations distributed kinescope recordings of the shows in 15
foreign countries. By 1952, the show was being broadcast
coast-to-coast in 21 cities across the United States and in
Canada. That same year the series was honored with TV's top
award, the George Foster Peabody Citation, as the nation's
outstanding educational television show--for the second
time. It would become the only show ever to be honored twice
by the Peabody committee.

"Though Hopkins scientists are not always polished
performers," wrote a TIME Magazine reviewer around that
time, "'Review' no longer has trouble persuading them to
appear. By last week, they were receiving fan letters at the
rate of 875 a week, fewer than Berle (who doesn't bother to
count them anymore), but enough to suggest that there is a
TV audience for something besides comics."

The mastermind behind Hopkins's entr‚e into
television was Lynn Poole, an energetic man with a sharp
mind and wide-ranging curiosity, who was hired in 1946 to be
the university's first director of public relations.

Before coming to Hopkins, the 36-year-old Poole had
started an adult and child education program at the Walters
Art Gallery in Baltimore, and had flown on 86,000 miles of
bombing missions in the Pacific as public relations officer
for the Air Force. During his stint in the service he also
created a traveling show, Wings Over America, which debuted
at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

His work in entertainment and education was to serve
him well at Hopkins as he went on to become the Science
Review's creator, producer, and, somewhat unexpectedly, its
emcee. (Just prior to the start of the series' third show, a
nervous guest professor asked Poole to stay close by in case
he froze up in front of the camera. Poole's steadying
presence worked so well that he became a fixture on the
show.)

With his closely cropped gray hair and conservative
suits, the slightly built Poole appeared to be the picture
of quiet dignity and self-restraint. But he had a sporting
side. During one show about insects, he opened a can of
grasshoppers and ate one to assure viewers that insects are
a source of food in some countries. During another show,
"Human Centrifuge," he gamely allowed himself to be spun
around in a chair. Reportedly green-faced, Poole barely made
it through the program. When the BBC invited him to London
to mark the Science Review's debut in Great Britain in 1952,
Poole decided that the best way to describe the world's
largest television tower was to climb partway to its top--on
the air.

Though Baltimore didn't yet have its own television
studio in 1946, Poole recognized the potential the new
medium held for providing "good, dignified publicity" for
Johns Hopkins, and for enabling the university "to carry the
values of knowledge beyond the limits of our campus."

So when, in 1947, the Baltimore Sun announced that it
would operate WMAR-TV, Poole was ready with some 30-minute
sample science demonstrations. The station liked what it saw
and agreed to work with Poole to produce eight weeks of live
telecasts. These experimental shows would begin appearing
throughout Baltimore in March 1948, and would be telecast
out of Remsen Hall at Homewood. While there were some at the
studio who suggested using professional actors, Poole was
adamant: Let the scientists themselves describe and explain
their work. Recognizing, however, that most viewers wanted
to be entertained as they learned, the visually minded Poole
had one cardinal rule: If you can't show it, don't talk
about it.

In going head-to-head with Milton Berle, and later such
popular shows as Gunsmoke, Dragnet, and The $64,000
Question, Poole knew he had to pull viewers in quickly, with
a dramatic attention-grabber, before they were tempted to
change the channel. "Are You Too Fat?" which aired in 1955,
for instance, opened with a shot of a shapely young woman,
clad only in a towel, climbing up on her bathroom scale.
Upon seeing her weight register on the dial, she gasped in
horror, throwing her hands to her mouth and dropping the
towel. (She was, viewers discovered, wearing a bathing suit.
This was 1955.)

In "What Is An Isotope?" in 1952, Hopkins biologist Bob
Ballentine got his show off to a rousing start when he drank
a beaker filled with radioactive iodine. At the program's
conclusion, he told the audience, he would use a Geiger
counter to see where the radioactivity had collected in his
body.

"This shocked a lot of people. At that time, most
people wouldn't have gotten in the same room with a
radioactive isotope if they could help it. They seemed to
think they would explode. When my mother found out, she went
into orbit," says the 80-year-old Ballentine today,
chuckling. Though his black hair has turned downy and gray
and his face has loosened with wrinkles, his demeanor hasn't
changed all that much from the 37-year-old who remains
captured on a grainy kinescope in the university's archives.

In doing the program, Ballentine says he wanted to help
temper the climate of fear that had surrounded radioactivity
ever since Hiroshima, by demonstrating some positive uses.
This theme was one that Hopkins TV returned to again and
again, with shows like "The Atom: Beast or Benefit?" and "X-
Ray: How It Works For You."

During "What Is An Isotope?" Ballentine showed how to
synthesize a radiotracer (using large wooden beads to
represent various molecules), then explained how these
tracers could be used in medical imaging. The show's climax
came when he grabbed the long wand of the Geiger counter and
began training it on various parts of his body. The
counter's crackling hiss reached its crescendo when he got
to his neck and the thyroid gland. "There really is nothing
to be afraid of in consuming doses of radioactive isotopes,"
Ballentine reassured the audience, then went on to explain
how radioactive iodine was being used to diagnose thyroid
conditions.

Looking back, the scientist says, "I'm not crazy. I had
the dose mixed by the radiation health expert at the School
of Medicine." He pauses as if considering, then divulges a
secret he's held onto for 43 years. "I did fudge it a
little. I took half the dose the night before in order to
give it time to accumulate in the thyroid."

Less than a year after the program's Baltimore debut,
CBS agreed to broadcast the Science Review along the East
Coast, from Boston to Richmond. Thus, on December 17, 1948,
Johns Hopkins became the first university to produce a
weekly television program on network television.

Since little was known at that time about production
techniques, Poole and the studio crew had to improvise. To
show how a fly drinks, the crew glued the fly's wings to a
stick, then lowered him over a dish of sugared water. They
spent close to an hour experimenting with magnification and
camera angles until they managed to get a screen-sized
picture of the insect, as it wiggled its hairy legs and
greedily dipped its proboscis into the water. When another
scientist asked the crew to capture the teeming life that
exists within a drop of water, the Science Review crew
became the first to couple a television camera to a
microscope. One of the networks was so impressed by the
breakthrough that it sent an engineer to Baltimore to see
just how it was done.

With live television, of course, the occasional snafu
was inevitable (see "Science Review
Bloopers,"). Just
ask Professor Emeritus John Kopper. The chemist, as was
customary, spent close to a month working out his
experiments and going over the script with Poole for "What
Is Electricity?" slated to be telecast on January 21, 1949.
What Kopper couldn't have prepared for was the arrival of
his first child, a daughter, who chose the day of the
telecast to enter the world--three weeks late. The tense
father-to-be learned of the happy outcome during a late
afternoon dress rehearsal. After rushing to the hospital for
a brief visit, he hurried back to campus, just in time for
the 8:30 p.m. telecast.

But the day's stressful events weren't over yet.
Several minutes into his explanation of atoms and electrons,
the Remsen Hall studio went black. The power had failed.
"Fortunately, the lights came back on again fairly quickly,"
says the 82-year-old Kopper. "I don't think I had to ad-lib
for more than 10 seconds."

Since hospitals weren't equipped with TV sets in those
days, Kopper's wife missed his big debut. His mother and
aunt didn't, though. The two teetotalers went out to a
tavern, he says, and watched it there. Kopper's eyes
twinkle. "It must have been quite a sight--these two old
ladies sitting there. I wonder what they ordered to drink."

Until the fall of 1950, the "Science Review" operated
without a budget. That meant Poole was virtually a one-man
band. He came up with ideas for shows, found the guests,
wrote the scripts, dug up the necessary props and equipment,
and hauled everything to the studio in a borrowed truck.
Though a variety of companies offered to sponsor the
program, the university declined, except for a nine-week
period when the Davis Chemical Company sponsored the show
locally.

Years later, Poole would tell a gathering of his fellow
public relations professionals, "When we look back on those
pioneer programs, we shudder." The morning after each
telecast, those involved took stock of what went wrong and
talked about ways to improve the next one, Poole said.

"Production shortcomings which literally have cried out
for correction thus far often have robbed the program of
much of its effectiveness," wrote a New York Times critic in
January 1949. The critic complained that the show's
explanatory charts and pictures "were much too difficult to
see," and he criticized Poole's on-air persona: "The idea of
casting the program's narrator as something of a dope,
asking the most elementary questions, also is very far-
fetched, particularly since the gentleman often lets slip an
intimate knowledge of what is happening." Nevertheless, the
reviewer didn't want the series abandoned. "It is too
worthwhile a venture--and too important as a precedent in
video--not to have every advantage."

Help was on the way. In October 1950, the series
switched to the DuMont network, which invested $7,500 in
1951 to help produce 52 shows. The following year, DuMont
doubled its contribution, and its local Baltimore affiliate,
WAAM-TV (later to become WJZ), kicked in $10,000 to help
with production, animation, and filming. The new funds
enabled Poole to hire first one, and later two, assistant
producers.

Though the Science Review was not aimed specifically at
children, its educational component made it a natural for
curious young minds. PTAs across the country placed it on
recommended viewing lists, and many science teachers wrote
in to say that they coordinated their lesson plans with the
program. One teacher in Virginia noted that he was afraid to
miss an episode, since his students inevitably bombarded him
with questions the next day. Hundreds of letters poured in
each week from viewers, many of them from children.

"My name is Bobby Stone and I want to be an astronomer
some day," wrote one boy from Fort Wayne, Indiana, in a 1953
letter addressed to Hopkins professor Paul Hessemer. In "The
Christmas Star," the astronomer had explained the miraculous
Star of Bethlehem as a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.
Bobby quickly got down to the real point of his letter:
"Would you tell me about how much money you get for being a
star gazer? Is it true that an astronomer is a man who has
already made his fortune and has nothing else to do?"

Perhaps the most negative viewer response came after a
show in which physicist Noel Scott de-mythologized UFOs. In
"What Are Flying Saucers?" Scott duplicated the conditions
of the upper atmosphere in a bell jar. Then he introduced an
electrical charge and created a small illuminated globule,
which darted around the jar much the way a "flying saucer"
might. Disgruntled viewers complained in droves, writing
that they would have preferred for UFOs to remain a mystery.
"You always try to explain things scientifically," huffed
one woman.

In late 1955, after seven years on the air, the Johns
Hopkins Science Review came to an end when DuMont went out
of business. But then the ABC network jumped in with an idea
for a new series. Aware of the growing need in industry for
young Americans well trained in science, ABC president John
Charles Daly suggested a series that focused on career
possibilities in a rapidly changing world. Hopkins's new
series, Tomorrow's Careers (called simply Tomorrow during
its first 12 telecasts), made its debut in March 1955 and
ran until June 1956.

Many of those whom Poole called on to appear were in
scientific fields: "Power Engineer," "Marine Scientist,"
"Agricultural Chemist." But the scope of this new series was
wider than before; this time around experts in fields like
government, business, law, and history were invited to
describe their work, make predictions about the future, and
talk honestly about their salaries. "We won't be coy about
the money," Poole told a New York Herald Tribune reporter
shortly after the series started. "Youngsters want to know
how much they will be able to afford for drapes and what
kind of a car they can expect to drive."

This broader scope remained when, in the fall of 1956,
Tomorrow's Careers gave way to Johns Hopkins File 7. This
series took viewers behind the doors of the university to
see professors at work in the arts and humanities, as well
as in science and industry. Viewers could tune in to watch
historian Sidney Painter describe the everyday life of a
medieval knight, or art historian Adolf Katzenellenbogen
discuss the "Resurrection of Christ in Art."

Quite a few episodes of File 7 went farther afield;
witness two different performances by folksinging legend
Pete Seeger, for instance, or the 1957 "Campus Christmas"
extravaganza that featured Hopkins's 70-member glee club, a
20-voice singing group from the University of Maryland, an
octet, a pianist-composer, and Hopkins President Milton S.
Eisenhower.

Eisenhower evidently felt at home in front of the
camera. He appeared in 18 episodes of File 7 during its
five-year run, including the series' finale, "Road from
Kenya." When the final credits rolled on that episode on the
afternoon of May 29, 1960, Johns Hopkins University's 12-
year involvement in television ended for good.

Though viewership was still high, Hopkins could no
longer afford to carry the program's expenses. Production
for commercial TV was becoming more elaborate--and
expensive. Other priorities within the university would have
to take precedence, Eisenhower announced at the conclusion
of that show. He voiced the hope, however, that "this will
be only an interruption, not a permanent termination." But
that was not to be.

No longer faced with the frenetic pace of producing a
weekly TV series, Lynn Poole was able to devote time to
writing. He and his wife, Gray, a magazine writer,
collaborated on more than 25 books, many of them about
scientific subjects and for children. In 1969, when the
couple was in California working on books about medical
quackery and archaeology, Lynn Poole suffered a heart attack
and died. He was 58 years old.

These days, TV buffs who are curious to see those
early shows for themselves must make a trip to the
University Archives, deep underground in the Milton S.
Eisenhower Library at Homewood. There, floor-to-ceiling
shelves hold canister after canister of the kinescope
recordings.

Many of the recordings were lost before the Archives
assumed responsibility for them in 1977. In fact, of the
close to 500 Hopkins telecasts between 1948 and 1960,
kinescope recordings today survive for only about 330
episodes. None remain from the Science Review's first two
years, says archivist Brian Stimpert as he walks among the
shelves.

There's worse news, judging by the faint odor of
vinegar that hangs in the air--a sure sign that the
cellulose ester film inside the canisters has begun to
deteriorate.

Six years ago, materials science professor Susan Barger
was called in to report on the condition of the kinescopes.
She found a wide range of deterioration: some films were
fine, while others had begun to fade and buckle. A study
conducted a year later by archival technician Brian
Harrington disclosed that the earliest recordings had
suffered the worst shrinkage.

Preserving the kinescopes is not an inexpensive
proposition, notes former archivist Julia Morgan. In a 1990
grant proposal, she estimated that it would cost roughly
$250 to transfer each film to videocassette (which could
then be copied and widely used) and to preserve the original
kinescope through ultrasonic cleaning. The proposal didn't
get funded.

Since then, in piecemeal fashion, the archivists have
managed to get about 30 episodes transferred to videotape,
which MSE users may now access. The remaining 300 kinescopes
are stored away in their metal canisters, too brittle for
use.

Robert Kargon thinks that's a shame. "Many of the
people interviewed on those programs were very significant
contributors to science and technology," notes the Hopkins
professor of the history of science. "It's very difficult to
get archival sources on these people that are visual and
have sound.

"Since we have them," he says, "it would be an absolute
pity to lose them."